Sometimes, Jonetta can piss me off...

I love Jonetta Rose Barras. The fact that for a few years she wrote a once/week piece in the Washington Times about local issues made me start reading that paper. I've bought some of her books (even if I haven't finished reading them...) and now she has a once/week column in the Examiner.

Yesterday, her column, "Commentary - Parks or people? Pick one" slammed people against the conversion of a local park for housing. Conveniently, she siezed on the comment of a "new cracker" to make her point.

From the piece:

But the unvarnished comments of a Northern Virginia transplant - in the fight to save a park at New York Avenue and First Street NW - can't be misclassified.The battle erupted publicly last month when an angry crowd of residents expressed outrage that Mayor Anthony A. Williams, D, had the audacity to propose building mixed-income housing on their park, known as the New York Avenue Playground. Worse, some of the folks who might live in the 98 town houses could be from Sursum Corda, a low-income cooperative of questionable reputation.The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development is threatening to foreclose on the cooperative; the city is trying to rescue it.

Mike Thiem, who moved to the neighborhood from Arlington six months ago, was quoted saying that he didn't pay half a million dollars for his house to "have drug dealers out on my step." He wants the government to banish citizens - many of whom have lived in the city far longer than he - to "vacant land in upper Northeast." Thiem is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kinda guy.

She sets up a false, "either-or" choice. City neighborhoods can and ought to have amenities and housing. In the days of McMansions and incredibly self-absorbed lives (televisions in SUVs are but one example) people forget that the stoops and public spaces of city neighborhoods served as the "living rooms" of communities in the days when houses were small and quite crowded (in the early part of the 20th century the average 1,200 square foot DC rowhouse had as many as 12 residents living in a 6 room house).

Giving up the amenities that make city life a joy is a mistake. You can't tell me that a staging program can't be devised that (1) rehabilitates Sursum Corda; (2) without displacement; and (3) without destroying neighborhood livability.

Even if Mike Thiem is a blockhead that doesn't justify sloppy "either-or" thinking vs. a broader more thoughtful "and-and" thinking and planning process.

Ted Rall (the great cartoonist) has this to say about sloppy thinking and "that's the way we've always done it" kind of thinking.



That being said, I think Jonetta Rose Barras is great. Make sure you subscribe to her intermittent e-newsletter, The Barras Report.